Search results for "Psychophysics"
showing 10 items of 90 documents
In praise of artifice reloaded: Caution with natural image databases in modeling vision
2019
Subjective image quality databases are a major source of raw data on how the visual system works in naturalistic environments. These databases describe the sensitivity of many observers to a wide range of distortions of different nature and intensity seen on top of a variety of natural images. Data of this kind seems to open a number of possibilities for the vision scientist to check the models in realistic scenarios. However, while these natural databases are great benchmarks for models developed in some other way (e.g., by using the well-controlled artificial stimuli of traditional psychophysics), they should be carefully used when trying to fit vision models. Given the high dimensionalit…
Fashion versus perception: the impact of surface lightness on the perceived dimensions of interior space.
2011
Objectives: We compare expert opinion with perceptual judgment regarding the influence of color on the perceived height and width of interior rooms. Background: We hypothesize that contrary to popular belief, ceiling and wall lightness have additive effects on perceived height, whereas the lightness contrast between these surfaces is less important. We assessed the intuitions of architectural experts as to which surface colors maximize apparent height and compared these intuitions with psychophysical height and width estimates for rooms differing in ceiling, floor, and wall lightness. Method: Experiment 1 was a survey of architectural experts and nonexperts. Experiments 2 and 3 presented v…
Near- and Far-Surround Suppression in Human Motion Discrimination.
2018
The spatial context has strong effects on visual processing. Psychophysics and modeling studies have provided evidence that the surround context can systematically modulate the perception of center stimuli. For motion direction, these center-surround interactions are considered to come from spatio-directional interactions between direction of motion tuned neurons, which are attributed to the middle temporal (MT) area. Here, we investigated through psychophysics experiments on human subjects changes with spatial separation in center-surround inhibition and motion direction interactions. Center-surround motion repulsion effects were measured under near-and far-surround conditions. Using a sim…
Subtle Increases in Interletter Spacing Facilitate the Encoding of Words during Normal Reading
2012
BackgroundSeveral recent studies have revealed that words presented with a small increase in interletter spacing are identified faster than words presented with the default interletter spacing (i.e., w a t e r faster than water). Modeling work has shown that this advantage occurs at an early encoding level. Given the implications of this finding for the ease of reading in the new digital era, here we examined whether the beneficial effect of small increases in interletter spacing can be generalized to a normal reading situation.MethodologyWe conducted an experiment in which the participant's eyes were monitored when reading sentences varying in interletter spacing: i) sentences were present…
Global flow impacts time-to-passage judgments based on local motion cues
2011
AbstractWe assessed the effect of the coherence of optic flow on time-to-passage judgments in order to investigate the strategies that observers use when local expansion information is reduced or lacking. In the standard display, we presented a cloud of dots whose image expanded consistent with constant observer motion. The dots themselves, however, did not expand and were thus devoid of object expansion cues. Only the separations between the dots expanded. Subjects had to judge which of two colored target dots, presented at different simulated depths and lateral displacements would pass them first. Image velocities of the target dots were chosen so as to correlate with time-to-passage only…
Channel Capacity in Psychovisual Deep-Nets: Gaussianization Versus Kozachenko-Leonenko
2020
In this work, we quantify how neural networks designed from biology using no statistical training have a remarkable performance in information theoretic terms. Specifically, we address the question of the amount of information that can be extracted about the images from the different layers of psychophysically tuned deep networks. We show that analytical approaches are not possible, and we propose the use of two empirical estimators of capacity: the classical Kozachenko-Lonenko estimator and a recent estimator based on Gaussianization. Results show that networks purely based on visual psychophysics are extremely efficient in two aspects: (1) the internal representation of these networks dup…
Changes in visual function and retinal structure in the progression of Alzheimer's disease
2019
Background Alzheimer's Disease (AD) can cause degeneration in the retina and optic nerve either directly, as a result of amyloid beta deposits, or secondarily, as a result of the degradation of the visual cortex. These effects raise the possibility that tracking ophthalmologic changes in the retina can be used to assess neurodegeneration in AD. This study aimed to detect retinal changes and associated functional changes in three groups of patients consisting of AD patients with mild disease, AD patients with moderate disease and healthy controls by using non-invasive psychophysical ophthalmological tests and optical coherence tomography (OCT). Methods We included 39 patients with mild AD, 2…
Psychophysical response to electrocutaneous stimulation.
1984
A method is presented to determine a reliable stimulus-sensation relationship particularly suitable for electrocutaneous stimulation. An experimental intensity-discrimination curve was obtained through simple psychophysical comparison tasks, and sensory response was inferred from integration of a JND's density function. The psychophysical response resembles a power law, although departures cannot be described in terms of a unique exponent. An estimate of binary information capacity per electrode is also given as a feature of a stimulation procedure that preserves a low value of the size-intensity product.
Visual Cortex Performs a Sort of Non-linear ICA
2010
Here, the standard V1 cortex model optimized to reproduce image distortion psychophysics is shown to have nice statistical properties, e.g. approximate factorization of the PDF of natural images. These results confirm the efficient encoding hypothesis that aims to explain the organization of biological sensors by information theory arguments.
Color induction via non-opponent lateral interactions in the human retina
1992
Retinal connections causing colors in Benham's top (pattern induced flicker colors, PIFCs) are investigated by psychophysical experiments. PIFCs are still seen when stimuli to different cones are demodulated selectively, indicating the involvement of non-opponent channels. PIFCs also occur on retinal areas next to those affected by modulated stimuli; further, both monochromat and dark-adapted trichromats perceive PIFCs which are achromatic. These additional findings point to horizontal cells as neuronal mediators of modulated excitation leading to PIFCs. The unspecifity of the postulated connection with respect to cone types agrees with anatomic findings of Boycott, B. B., Hopkins, J. M. an…